


The Distant Tower

by jonnilicious



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: But what ya gonna do, Gen, In fact possibly too much navel-gazing, Navel-Gazing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-17
Updated: 2016-12-17
Packaged: 2018-09-09 04:27:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8875900
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jonnilicious/pseuds/jonnilicious
Summary: Set post-Inquisition. Solona Amell and the infamous mage Garrett Hawke, along with some of their various colourful associates, have joined forces, and their travels bring them to the Circle Tower in Ferelden. Wine, snarkery and a discussion about the nature of the Circles follows.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I had this idea for Hawke and the Hero of Ferelden to meet up a little while ago and have the kind of ridiculous adventures only two people like them possibly could. The grander story is still a work in progress, but this one scene from the middle just came to me in the night and I had to get it out of me, or risk having it plague me at every turn. Please excuse the vagueness of what their quest actually is, and who they're travelling with. This was just what I imagined two mages who had very different upbringings might think about the Circle, right or wrong.

The Spoiled Princess Inn was almost the same as Solona remembered it. Too much the same. She quietly slipped away from the crowd, taking her goblet of wine to the bench outside while the others racked up a bar tab that almost rivalled Oghren’s from years before. At this point in their travels, Isabela’s shaky but nonetheless full-throated sea shanties were basically background noise to her, and she tuned out the dirtier verses of “The Seaman’s Last Voyage” as she sipped her wine and watched the sun set behind the Circle Tower, stretching high out of the lake in the distance.

“Is this a specifically-designated moment for the hero to brood, or can anyone join in?”

Naturally, Hawke didn’t wait for a response before he swung himself onto the bench opposite her. He had apparently decided the Inn’s goblets and tankards weren’t up to his standards, and was swigging his own wine out of a large vase he had probably snatched off some windowsill. A lone daisy dropped over the brim as he knocked it back.

“No brooding, just... contemplating,” she replied, still watching the tower.

“Yeah, I knew an elf who called it that, too.”

Hawke lounged contentedly on his bench. Solona had the impression that Hawke would contrive to lounge on a bed of nails. Somewhere inside, a glass smashed, and somebody cheered.

“I know you aren’t really one to get down and debaucherous with the locals these days, but this does seem like an odd moment for a ‘lone warrior gazing into the setting sun with misgivings and melancholy’ scene,” he said, eyeing her up with that mischievous smile she had long ago learned also meant he was summing her up.

“We did a good thing today. Think of all the corpses!”

“Yes, any moment now I shall organise a parade,” she said, drily. “I’m not... unhappy. It’s just, being here. Again. After all this time.” She cast another look at the tower. “Full circle, as they say.”

“Really? I heard it was running more medium-to-empty, these days.” Hawke’s grin only widened at her dirty look. “Sorry, couldn’t help myself.”

“Sometimes I wish you would try.” Solona threw back the last of her wine, and then exhaled heavily.

“I haven’t been back to the Tower in so many years. More than a decade, I think. It was after the Blight ended, but I was still so... young. Everything that I’ve done since then... I don’t know. It feels like that place shouldn’t even still be there, if that makes any sense. My entire childhood is bound up in the bricks of that tower, but I am so far, far removed from that person now. For the tower to still be just standing there like always, it feels wrong somehow.” She tapped her goblet against the bench, absentmindedly.

“I wouldn’t know about that,” Hawke said, airily. “My childhood home really doesn’t exist anymore. Burnt and razed by darkspawn, all that.”

Solona eyed him.

“I spoke to your friend, Varric. He told me not to stand for you using your ‘tragic backstory’ as a means to ‘out-hero’ me. I didn’t fully understand what he meant, but I’m fairly sure you’re trying it now.”

Hawke grinned.

“Yeah, well, never be without a good sob story, I always say. A sympathetic ear is usually attached to a sympathetic purse.” He swilled his wine around in its vase. The flower was gone, and Solona wondered if he’d drunk it on purpose. It seemed like a very Hawke thing to do.

“Anders is nervous about going back there as well, if it helps,” he said, after a moment. “Hence his rather enthusiastic participation in Isabela’s drinking games at this moment.

“He and I have very different reasons to be nervous, I’m sure,” Solona said, darkly.

“Right, right,” Hawke obviously wasn’t in the mood to open up that old debate again. “If it’s really that difficult for you, we can probably go it without you tomorrow. Between my fantastical abilities and with Anders and Neria as backup, we can probably-“

“No,” she cut him off, firmly. “That statue, Eleni Zinovia, she knows me. She spoke to me before, years ago, like she knew me. I can make her tell us what we need to know.”

“You’re very confident.”

“Generally, yes.”

“Must say, it’s a nice change of pace not to be the one steering this crazy ship for once,” he said, amiably. “Through no fault of my own, most of those people in there have become convinced that I actually know what I’m doing! It pushes me worryingly close towards pants-wetting territory.”

“My pants have never been drier.”

“Said the waitress to the priest.”

“What?”

“What?”

“Anyway,” Solona said, deciding, as usual, that only about a third of what Hawke said was designed to be responded to, “it’s not that I’m nervous, as such. Anders was the one who broke out all those times, not me. It’s just... going back to where it all began. It feels strange.”

“You have come an extraordinarily long way,” Hawke agreed. Solona realised that she was waiting for a punch line, and when none came, a rare occurrence indeed, she carried on.

“When I was in the Circle, all those years ago, things were so... not easy, but clear, perhaps. Mages were locked up, templars did the locking up, and there was lots of unhealthy resentment on either side. Everyone mostly knew where they stood. My life hasn’t been that black and white in a very long time.”

“It wasn’t that black and white _then_ ,” Hawke pointed out. “Every circle has templars that want to help mages, and mages that wish they were templars, and everything in between.” He took a long pull on his wine as Solona watched him, intrigued by this rare moment of sincerity.

“That’s why the Circles never worked, not really. Templars and the Chantry act like all mages are one way, and mages act like everyone in the Chantry is another way, when really everyone is _every_ way. Treating people like they are all these specific things just because they happen to be _one_ specific thing, it doesn’t work. Ever. People are people, and people are complicated.”

He nodded, satisfied with giving his take on the world.

“The ease with which I am able to interpret your ramblings these days is horrifying,” Solona remarked. She snatched the sloshing vase from Hawke’s hand, and took a gulp for herself.

“They want my support,” she said, after a moment of silence.

“The Circle? With what?”

“Rebuilding. Reforming. Whatever it is they’re trying to do. They want Chantry funding to get back on their feet after everything that happened during the rebellions.”

“They do realise you aren’t actually in the Chantry, right?”

“Yes, but I am very well acquainted with our new Divine. And Leliana- sorry, _Divine Victoria_ \- would probably be more than happy to step in if I asked. But Irving asked for my help on the public front, to get the people behind the Circle and everything it stands for.”

“And you don’t want to do that?”

“I... don’t know that I can,” she said, honestly.

“I didn’t think you were part of the anti-Circle bunch,” Hawke mused. “Anders would probably never have left your side if he thought you were on his, in that way.”

“I’m not, but I’m not exactly pro-Circle either.”

“How can you not be one or the other?”

“Weren’t you just saying that people aren’t as black and white as everyone thinks they are? I think the Circles are important, I do. Mages need a place to discover and train their powers where they won’t be a danger to themselves or anybody else.”

“I did all right,” Hawke said, with the slightest edge to his amiable voice.

“You’re an exception, you must know that.”

“I’ve often thought so,” he said, with his usual grin. Solona ignored it.

“But keeping us locked up all our lives... it doesn’t just breed resentment and anger, like it did with Anders and countless others. It... it warps your view of the outside world. When I was younger, all I had to entertain myself with outside of lessons was reading. I spent hours and hours in the library, reading all about Thedas’ history and its people and cultures, but as much as I learned, it was just books. Pages in a story. None of it was _really_ real, not as far as I knew. Everything outside of those walls was just as much of a story to me as the tales of Theobold the Brave. And when I finally got out into the world, it was... a shock.”

“I think going through the Battle of Ostagar and the Joining would shock anyone, Circle mage or no,” Hawke put in.

“It wasn’t just that, not just the things I saw. It was the things I _did_. My entire world, my entire life, was spent as one tiny person in one tower cut off from all of everything. And suddenly I was on this ridiculous, impossible quest to save the world from unspeakable evil. It was like being transported into one of the old books I used to read. I thought that anything I did, any action I took, any whim I indulged in, was the right thing to do, because I was ‘The Hero’, and heroes don’t do the wrong thing.”

She trailed off.

“You’re thinking about the werewolves,” Hawke said, gently. She shot a look at him, and he smiled, softly. “I pick up on things.”

“It was stupid. That’s all I can think, now. It was a stupid, impulsive, decision made by a stupid, angry girl who should never have had the power or opportunity to do the things I did. Not in a sane world.”

Solona felt the quaver come into her voice, and fiercely willed it gone. Hawke gave her a few moments, before venturing his question.

“How did it happen? You hear stories, but, I know all too well how stories can be.”

She sighed.

“It was simple, really. Too simple. The Brecilian Forest was the first place we journeyed to with the Warden Treaties after Ostagar, after Lothering. I was still... damaged, I suppose. My best friend in the Tower, Jowan, he deceived me, and betrayed me. And then Ostagar, and Loghain, and the darkspawn... I was angry. So angry that I had to pretend I wasn’t, or I wouldn’t be anything else. I was angry at Jowan for lying to me, angry at the Grey Wardens for keeping secrets, angry at Loghain for abandoning them, mad at everyone who got killed because of it.”

She stopped. It had been years and years since she had spoken about this to anyone, and never in this much detail. She wasn’t even sure why she was doing it now, really, but she felt she couldn’t stop. Wordlessly, Hawke handed her back the vase, and she drank deep.

“And then we got caught up in the chaos between the elves and the werewolves, and I just remember thinking, is this what the world is? People hurting other people, and then hurting them more if they dare to retaliate? Everything felt... hollow, and unreal. This wasn’t the world I thought was out there. I wasn’t ready to deal with anything, not really, and everything I was doing was just... too much. It made something, inside me. Something dark, and hateful, and I couldn’t get rid of it.”

Hawke just watched as she took her time. Somewhere in the Inn, what sounded like a shelf of liquor crashed to the ground. She definitely heard Isabela yell “50 points!”

“And when we found out that Zathrian, the Dalish Keeper, had been lying to everyone, and he was the cause of all that death and destruction and hate, and he’d done nothing to end it, that part of me just thought, give it back to him. Give him back all that pain. If this is what the world is, fight fire with fire, and win.”

“And then the werewolves killed the elves,” Hawke supplied.

“It wasn’t even their idea!” Solona cried. She was trying to control her voice, but something was trying to escape her throat, and it came out like a squawk. “I talked them into it. I told them to murder the Dalish. All of them. And now, the wolves are stuck like that forever, because of me.”

“But you learned from that,” Hawke said, in a hard voice. She looked at them. Every time she told that story, which wasn’t often, it was invariably met with ‘you made a mistake’, or ‘you didn’t know what would happen’. Hawke wasn’t trying to ease her guilt, but he wasn’t punishing her either.

“You learned that hate doesn’t heal hate.” It was a statement, but it felt like a question.

“I did.” He smiled at her, the smile he gave to Isabela, and Varric, and even his brother. It was that ‘I like you, you can stay’ smile of the Champion that so many people had been drawn to. It was the way she and her friends had looked at each other during the Blight. She felt herself pull back.

“I also learned that love doesn’t heal hate, either.”

She stood up, and ascended the outside stairs to her room on the Inn’s top floor, avoiding the party inside, and leaving Hawke sitting alone with his wine.


End file.
